Geek Like Me by Susan Juby

Susan Juby is the over-the-top hilarious author of the Alice series, Another Kind of Cowboy, and Getting the Girl. Getting the Girl has been reviewed by the NSCGs here. If you plan on reading her books, get ready to unleash a geeky guffaw. I am not kidding.

There was a time when I fronted. Yes, it’s true. I tried to pretend that I was not harboring a geek the size of a 1970s rec room just under my skin. I paid a terrible price for geekery when I was a kid (think groups of children chanting about mismatched footwear and indeterminate gender thanks to persistent and poorly executed pixie haircut) and decided, enough! Being a geek is too hard.

So I covered my inner geek with inoffensive, earth-toned carpets and posters of Scott Baio. I kept the big words to a minimum and hid my books. I stopped spending every spare minute wandering about in swamps with a jar and a large net because I wanted to be Gerald Durrell when I grew up.

In other words, I shamed my geek. She kept trying to come out. She made me fall in love with bands no one else could stand and caused me to glom onto the worst possible aspects of the latest fashions, including but not limited to granny boots worn with striped and lacy bloomers and puffy sleeved white shirts.

After high school, I should have let her free. But she was so explosive in her needs, that I was a little afraid. Instead I hung out with other people who let their geek flags fly. I hoped proximity would calm her. It worked for a while, but by the time university was over, she would no longer be denied.

I knew she was loose in all her orange plaid glory, complete with green shag carpet and buck teeth, when she dragged me off to join an aquarium hobbyist club. In the years since, she’s kept me busy with trips to look at show chickens and yearly readings of Lord of the Rings. She sometimes makes me wear a wet suit, goggles and flippers to the lake across from our house. In June. Teen girls will be sprawled around in tiny yellow bikinis, surrounded by flexing and imposing young men. And then there will be me and my inner rec room geek standing on the beach like the creature from the black lagoon.

The tanned people snicker as my geek and I walk gingerly into the water. (We wear a wetsuit because she hates being cold and doesn’t care who knows it). When I’m tempted to be embarrassed, I shrug and think, ah, well, she’s earned it. You have no idea what she went through as a kid.